Donde Haya Injuria
by SkippyStrikesBack
Summary: Two survivors of a dead city, both too alone to take on the legions of the damned around them, must unite in order to escape the horrible shades of their previous lives.
1. The Awakening

_Donde Haya Injuria:_

A Story of Love in a World of Death

This Fanfiction is rated R for sexual content (but this is no lemon here, folks), heavy language, some possible drug references, random offensive stuff, and explicit gore and violence, like when the heroes bust open that zombie's head like a fuckin' grape, and the brains splat all over, and it's so SWEET! AHAHAHAH! Also, small children and the emotionally sensitive should not be exposed to what I am currently calling 'my sense of humor', at least until the experts find a more appropriate word. (Save a Life: Wear a Helmet when you die.)

Oh, also, I do not own anything Resident Evil-related, nor am I making money from this. I also do not own any other copyrights or registered trademarks included in the 'fic for realism's sake. The only money I may receive in connection with this fanfic is from a personal injury lawsuit, when somebody decides I "didn't get that one detail right, which is clearly stated in Code Veronica: X, you damn RE n00b" and busts my head in with a pipe. I did my best, friends. Enjoy.

The bell rang, a lonely and distant sound that finally managed to drag me roughly up from the warm happy place I used to call sleep. My forehead had stuck to my arm where I had nestled it into the crook of my elbow for optimum darkness/comfort, and I peeled it off with a distasteful little 'scritch' sound and a grimace. The drab, dirty-looking walls and the mental-institution-resembling metal-on-metal desks brought me back to a fuzzy semblance of reality. Right. School, piss on walls between classes, detention. And then…apparently, teacher and rest of detention class deserts me, probably for ice cream and board games. Anyway, nobody else was there, and the desks were all lying at crazy angles like everyone had panicked and ran and nobody had bothered to clean up or wake me.

It was dark outside, too, and I got up and went to the line of windows to see whatever it was that I could see, which wasn't much. The sky was a mess of roiling clouds, and the streets beneath me, the ones I could see, were deserted. As I watched, an advertising insert, or at least a fistful of colored paper, blew along Conrad Avenue and smacked into an abandoned shopping cart sitting in the intersection of Conrad and Main. That was weird, and I know from experience. Most days in Raccoon City (yes, everyone laugh at the name now, har har, get them chuckles out), Conrad and Main are choked with cars rushing off to and from the Umbrella plant down on Harvill Street, or to restaurants and malls and arcades. Conrad and Main are, conveniently, not only the streets on which Raccoon City North High School (home of the Hobgoblins, rah!) sits, but also the _two most congested_ avenues in town. Go figure, kids like me have a hell of a time getting home.

But that day, Conrad and Main were deserted. And that I could believe, except that a cart from the K-Mart is sitting the intersection under a green right-of-way arrow, and the guy who runs that K-Mart, Joe Yin, is a fucking _Nazi_ for professionalism. And more power to the guy, Nazi references notwithstanding. But suffice it to say that an abandoned cart, blocking the hypothetical but nonexistent traffic, would be grounds for execution. I would not want to be the poor grunt caught napping when it was his turn to clean up the Cart Corrals. These were my first thoughts in what the world would later call the Great Plague, or The Second Black Death. Or, sometimes with tongue firmly in cheek, the Black Undeath. The only people with wise enough asses to call it that, though, are people who haven't seen firsthand what the T-Virus can do. Manufactured by (all-hail!) the Umbrella Corporation, makers of fine tools, construction supplies, medicines, and biological weapons since 1992.

With confusion now firmly entrenched and quite at home in my mind, I decided to take a look around the school, with the vague hope that someone would explain why traffic had vaporized down on Conrad and why no janitor or teacher had bothered to set the desks in the detention rooms back on their spindly steel legs. Oh, the irony of that.

I headed out the door and into the twilight halls. For some reason the fluorescent bulbs overhead were dead, and the only light in that hall, squeezed between the lockers on one side and those on the other, came through the single window at each end. Other than that, nothing. A pile of junk sitting beside a forgotten broom and a sweater sleeve sticking out of some kid's open locker (looked for all the world like a human arm then, and I wonder to this day if it wasn't) were the only things I could see.

"Hello?" I called. My ill-advised greeting echoed metallically off the lockers and down around the corner. "Anybody home?"

I started off toward the corner- the school was built like a big 'U', and I was in one of the trailing arms- and called out again.

"Hell-oooooo?"

I waited for a second before turning the corner at the end of the hall. I was starting to get a hairy kind of feeling, like in the movies, right before the unsuspecting teen walks into his untimely demise. I felt a lot like that right then. Something moved, slowly and distinctly. It sounded like the movement was coming from underneath me, and I was right there at the stairs.

"Hey, if you're there, call back!" I shouted. "Um…shout back! Whatever!"

Down those stairs, I heard the answer. It was a low groan, guttural, like the noise a large animal or a very severely injured person might make.

"Hey man, you okay? If you're hurt…hey, I'll be down in a second!"

I busted down the stairs, skipping one or two with every step, thinking with blind naiveté that I was gonna be a hero. Nevermind that just seconds ago, I had been wondering where every fucking human being in the facility had gone. I never put a whole lot of thought into my actions at that time. No, I rushed down the stairs and into the hallway, looking every which way for the hurt guy that I was planning to save. Instead, there was a limping figure in the hall, holding the wall for support and facing toward the "5" door.

"You all right, mister? You sound pretty sick."

The hallway guy lurched around at the sound of my voice, shoving himself off the wall and turning toward me. When I saw him for what he really was, all limp muscles and mindless hunger, with runny tendrils of someone else's blood sticking to his lips, I screamed. And then I saw the patch on his jacket…

Jerry. This was Jerry, the guy who cleaned the detention room and cracked jokes with me when the moderator was away. Hell, this was the man who brought me Snickers from the vending machines if he thought he could get away with it, and now Jerry was standing in front of me with a ragged O of gore around his mouth, bellowing at his throatiest, most bestial, and least intelligent. His hair, like his limbs, had gone all limp and was clumping together where the blood had matted it down. Jerry opened his mouth- perhaps _forced_ open his mouth is better, it seemed to take visual effort- and roared again.

"Jerry, man what the _fuck_-"

I didn't quite finish what I was going to say (-happened to you?), because as Jerry threw himself toward me with that terrible, unsatisfiable hunger, there was an intense roaring and the zombie's (I still find it tough to use that word) head exploded. Most of the head-goo landed on my shoes, and I about puked. It wasn't just blood, but blood and little chunks of solid gray stuff, surrounded by a thin fluid, and then, oh dear sweet Jesus, there were _living things_ there. They were maggots, and whether they were mutants or virus-laden, I'll never know, but there they were, and then I _felt_ it, movement in my hair, and it was then that I did puke. I vomited all over the shit that had come out of Jerry's head and all over my shoes, and in the back of my rational mind I _swore_ that I would go buy new shoes at the soonest opportunity. When I was finished yarking all over my old buddy's remains, I looked up into the huge, beautiful green eyes of who would be my sole companion for the next six or so weeks.

She was short, 5'5" tops, and she had the biggest eyes, which made the strange and oddly attractive illusion that she was stuck in a perpetual sensation of wonder. She had tied her shoulder-length hair into a spunky little palm tree that spouted out of the top of her head, and she was toting a BFG. Which is to say, a big, fuckin' gun.

"Oh good," she said. "A survivor."


	2. Conversations With Kara

"What the hell?" I answered, with as much dignity as I could. "Who are you?"

"I'm Kara Westrin, from St. Lawrence Catholic. I've been scouring this part of town for hours, but there's nothing but guys like him."

I noticed that she was in fact wearing some kind of uniform, what looked like blue slacks and a white polo shirt that may have inadvertently accentuated her curvature. I noticed _that_ right away, despite myself and my less than stellar situation.

"What happened and why are there people like him?"

"Hold on, buddy. I just saved your life. What's your name and what have you been doing since the city fell apart?"

"I'm Dylan F. Edgerton, the F stands for 'fucking', like when the teachers see that I'm in their class. I guess I've been sleeping."

"Oh great. Do you always introduce yourself, 'Dylan-fucking-Edgerton'? And what do you mean, sleeping?"

"I mean I was in detention, everyone disappeared, and I just woke up a minute before you started this Columbine re-enactment on Jerry there. And…no…not really."

"Oh. I was in the drama closet back at school and left the key in the lock. When the sirens went off, someone shut the door on me. I eventually broke my way out with a bust of Pallas."

I smacked my forehead.

"How literary."

"Thanks. Anyway, my school was a lot like yours, except that a clique of girls were already zombies when I got out, and I had to get away from them, at least until I found this."

I gazed at the gun appraisingly, if not downright admiringly. It was a pretty sweet piece of iron. The way that curvy Kara held it in her hands, like an old pro, was even better.

"Who the hell, at a Catholic school, had a gun like _that_?"

Kara blushed a little."

"Well…me. Dad's a hunter, and we forgot to take it out of the truck after our last hunt. It was just under the seat like always. I suppose if the principal or someone had seen it, I'd have gotten in trouble, but…"

"Um, all right. So you went to school in your truck, toting a gun, and…what kind of piece is that, anyway?"

"Oh, this? Standard 12-guage pump action, manufactured by Umbrella, and they call their model the Lord of the Hunt. Corny, eh? Anyway, it's loaded with buckshot now, the better to blow you away with, my dear, but I've got a couple boxes of birdshot in the truck in case anything comes up."

"Dear God. I'm sticking with you. Do you have that truck here now?"

"Certainly, but we need a place to hole up for the night. You prolly saw it getting dark?"

"Yeah. Looks like the end of the fucking world out there."

Kara was silent at that, and my words hung in the air like one of the clouds even now covering the setting sun. She stared out at the gray, empty city through the shatterproof glass in the school doors. Finally, she turned back to me.

"Where's the most secure place in your school?"

"Well…"

Honestly, I didn't know. I was kind of a skid, and did my best to avoid any knowledge of school or its campus, even to the point of ignoring what I already knew. Finally, I just had to decide.

"I don't spend a whole lot of time around there, understand," I said, "but I hear that the band wing is like a fortress. It's either that or the guys' locker rooms."

"Ugh. Let's try the band stronghold."

I led her down that way, past the empty gyms with the slowly swaying basketball nets, down through lonely classrooms and places that might never see a human being again, all of them crying out for one last mortal breath, pleading with us to stay with them, until they rocked us to sleep and died alongside their makers. We went to the actual rehearsal room first, but there were two exits and a window (not to mention that all those silent music stands gave us the creeps), so we went next to the percussion room. This was better, since the only entrance was a heavy metal door with a shatterproof sheet of glass in it that served for a window. The rest of the room was painted a silvery blue, and bits of pro-band propaganda hung from the walls, little regional championships and cutouts from the _Raccoon Times_ that featured one drummer or another. We shoved a huge concert bass drum up against the window- we didn't yet know if the zombies could see us or would notice us through the glass- and tried to make ourselves comfortable.

Neither of us wanted to leave there after we'd gotten so safely in, so we didn't go out for food or blankets. Instead, we emptied the other bass drums of the old sweatshirts that served as a muffle and made ourselves a nest. I toyed around with different instruments for part of the next nine hours, until I knocked over a cymbal rack with a tremendous crash and Kara yelled at me to stop fuckin' around. We heard shuffling go past the room about five minutes after the crash, and then heard another shuffle going in the opposite direction, but after that it was quiet all night. I offered to take the first watch, but Kara gave me a suspicious look.

"You ever fired one of these?" she asked, hefting the shotgun in one hand and patting the pump with the other.

"Not one of those. I play paintball all the time, though," I said.

Kara lifted her nose a little, and sniffed. It's an understatement to say that the percussion room reeked of disdain…and old sweat.

"Paintball guns have no recoil at all. If you aim like you would on one of those pea-shooters, you'll probably blow the ceiling up, unless you're aiming at your feet. Also, you can't hold the gun the same. You need to be firm with it, 'cause it'll kick. I know paintball guns are pretty much a point-and-click interface, but you have to _control_ a real gun."

"I think I can handle it, Kara. We're in a freaking safe; I won't even need it. If it's that bad, you'll probably either be awake anyway, or dead."

"How tactful. You can have the first watch, but I'll be up for awhile anyway. We might as well talk for the time, since we seem to be the last people alive in this forsaken city."

After she said this, Kara's face took on a funny expression. It's hard to describe accurately, but it looked as if she was blending thoughtfulness and melancholy. Her eyes didn't focus on anything really, except maybe the floor. The little muscles in her temples shifted restlessly, and she kept chewing on the inside of her bottom lip. The ridiculous little palm tree ponytail bobbed and swayed with her minute movements.

"Hey, Kara?"

She looked up at me, but her eyes still seemed to be struggling to focus.

"Mmm?"

"What are you thinking? There's something big going on in there."

"Oh…" She looked startled. "Um, I was thinking about this zombie thing. We don't know what started it, or if there are survivors. If there are, how many? Is the whole world like this, or just Raccoon City?"

I looked up, at the bass drum covering our only view of the outside.

"I don't know, Kara. I know even less than you. I was asleep."

I paused for a moment, and then plowed ahead when it because apparent that asking the questions I had to wouldn't matter if we were the only humans left in the world: there would be no one to care.

"Are they really zombies, like in the movies? Or are they people?"

"I don't know, Dylan, but I hope to God that they're really dead. I heard someone shouting, while I waited in that dark closet, and I thought they said that it was a disease. You catch it from either contact or blood, I don't know. No one could decide. But if its curable…I couldn't say. It doesn't look like it."

"Do you have a boyfriend, Kara?"

This time, that look of unfocus sharpened into a deadly point.

"What? Why?"

"I don't know, Kara, we're the last humans on earth. I was curious."

"No, Dylan, I don't have a boyfriend."

I waited for a moment more, then asked the biggest one.

"Did he die today, Kara? Did you kill him?"

Kara burst into tears, lay her head on my shoulder and nodded against my neck. Her crystal-drop tears melted into my wrinkled black Offspring t-shirt that hadn't been washed in three days of wear. She cried and nodded, and I gently touched her shoulder, and she put her arm around me, and finally she cried herself to sleep in the pile of sweatshirts next to me, and then I fell asleep, and first watch be damned.


	3. Trips to WalMart

When I woke up, or rather, flailed pathetically out of a dream in which I was firing birdshot into some zombie who, in the strange realm of dream-understanding, was Kara's recently deceased boytoy (and who happened to look disturbingly like Brad Pitt in that movie, _Ocean's Eleven_), Kara was already gone. There was a tense second where I was sure, _abso-fucking-lutely_ sure, that she was Mr. Zombie Premium Kibble for some lucky, wandering undead. But the sleep hadn't quite cleared from my head, and in a second I found her, huddled up beside some now-kaput band kid's _glockenspiel_. Her head was in her arms, and I wasn't sure if she was napping, crying, or thinking. Then she saw I was up, and she rubbed her arm against her face, and when she looked at me, she was grinning. I might have sworn that while she was looking up, there was nothing but melancholy and tear-stains on her pretty face, but that grin told me otherwise…didn't it?

But the sole remaining human being in Raccoon City (the sole remaining human who wasn't me, anyway) got up and hefted the sweet-looking shotgun over her shoulder.

"Well, cowpoke, let's rustle us up some doggies," she said.

"Yee-haw. When we're done wrestling the doggies, can we get the fuck out of here?"

Kara stuck her short, pink tongue out at me.

"That was exactly what I meant. We'll head out to the truck, forage some supplies, and before you know it, we'll be on the open road."

I didn't even bring up the problems I had with that; Kara seemed too optimistic for me to burst her happy-bubble just now. She'd taken a big enough hit yesterday, and was doing her best not to trouble me with that. It wouldn't do for me to point out that most of the town was surrounded by dense forest, and the best, perhaps only, way out was over the Raccoon City Bridge (hotel of choice for various hobos, drifters, and lovers out looking for a safe bed-away-from-home). Add to that the added trouble of getting through traffic in a city probably choked by zombies, abandoned vehicles, and combinations thereof.

I smiled.

"Sweet. When can we head out?"

"Right away, especially if that inconsiderate zombie that kept shuffling back and forth has left."

"He probably got tired of waiting for us. Let's check it out."

Ever so carefully, my intrepid companion nudged the bass drum away from the window. Nothing moved on the other side of the window. I looked out into the hall, first down one way, then the other. The coast was clear, I hoped…I really hoped.

"Looks good," I said. I had a sudden, short-lived, and brutal vision of a legless zombie, with his lips still dripping with what used to be a person, waiting for us just outside this very door. I stood on my tiptoes, but I couldn't quite see low enough to completely shake that thought. Instead, I looked over my shoulder to make sure that Kara was right there with the gun (she was), put my hand on the doorknob, counted to a very long three seconds, and pushed, twisting the doorknob as I did. The hall was dead silent. Down one end and up the other, nothing but emptiness stalked the school as far as we could see. We could have heard a pin drop, were there any pins in dropping distance.

"Let's go," I whispered. It seemed wrong, kind of, to break that creepy silence. I suppose that I couldn't have filled it by myself, anyway.

"Yeah."

Kara was whispering, too. Must have been contagious.

The lady and I power-walked down the hall like two soldiers in Somalia (or at least, in _Black Hawk Down_) I took the lead, ("breaker-one, this is Scout Squad A, do you copy?"), and Kara followed, toting the Lord of the Hunt ("shut your idiot face, Dylan!"). We didn't run into any dead-heads in the school, though: the murky dark halls were completely empty, except for one boy playing soldier, and one girl playing savior.

Her truck, like her piece, was a sweet block of iron, a big Chevy 4x4 from the looks of it, and loaded for bear. The back was half-full of plywood, and what looked like loose tools from a tipped-over metal box were scattered all over the truck's bed. There was a cord of rope and some jumper cables added in, as if to make the recipe complete. The whole jumble smelled like oil and hard work; it reminded me of my own dad's garage. But he lived way up in Iowa…it wasn't like I was ever going to see him again, not with the Incident in Raccoon City. Even while I climbed up in the cab, sitting right there next to Kara, it was hard to believe we'd see another sunrise.

"Didn't you say we were going for supplies?" I asked.

Kara propped her elbows on the bottom curve of the steering wheel and gave me an irritated look.

"That's right. Do you have a better idea, oh navigator?"

"Hey, I wasn't being a dick. It just looks like you have all the supplies we'll need back in the bed."

"I don't know about that. I was thinking food, clothes, maybe a mattress or a tent. I mean…we don't know if this sickness made it past the bridge, or how far it's gotten."

"I guess you're right…you want to try that K-Mart out on Conrad?"

Kara shook her head. Her little palm tree of hair swayed in the wind.

"Already done, on the way here. I was hoping to score some more ammo, but the place is overrun with zombies. I don't know why, but they seem to be having trouble with the doors. You know, that K-Mart doesn't even have automatic doors?"

I did remember that: as a lifelong friend of detention, I had spent many a long afternoon looking out at that K-Mart. Most of the time, I would get antsy enough to want a candy bar or a Pepsi on the way home, so I'd stop in there. I remember Mr. Yin (the owner, remember?) telling me once that the automatic doors were too expensive now, and until profits picked up, I'd just have to spend some extra energy and do it myself. I asked him what the crippled people would have to do, and he smiled.

The man runs a tight ship, but he's not entirely without humor.

"Shop at Wal-Mart," he'd said.

So that's what we did. Kara tore out of the parking lot, tires screeching on the blacktop, and swung her way into the wrong lane, heading down Conrad. The Wal-Mart, if I remembered correctly, was just down that way, and once you got down near the cluster of fast food places, you took a sharp left onto Bozell Boulevard. Bozell was an important thoroughfare, and the Wal-Mart was in a little strip mall alongside it. Kara followed my directions wordlessly, weaving with dangerous skill in and out of stopped and idling cars that had fallen along the street. As we neared Bozell, I saw something rising over the east tower of the Umbrella plant.

"Kara," I said, pointing toward the suspicious shadow. "What does that look like to you?"

"Like smoke?" she said, not glancing at the gathering cloud for more than a second.

"What does that mean?"

Kara looked at me for a second, then swerved wildly around a median wall.

"Nothing for us," she responded after righting the truck's course. "All we need to do is grab some supplies and get the hell out of Raccoon."

I shut my mouth and silently watched the smoky cloud gather over East Raccoon City. Something that had never happened before happened then: coming down from the jolt that followed Kara hitting a pothole dead-on, I felt a short but vicious spike of melancholy. It dawned on me that my mother and stepdad were either dead or zombies by now, that the city of my birth and most of my life was gone. It wasn't coming back. I let a comfortable dullness settle over my mind in response to that troubling thought. Damn…I couldn't take that kind of thinking right now.

I thought about telling Kara about it, but then I remembered my dad. I suppose that Kara must have considered herself lucky for most of her life; after all, her parents were probably still together and they seemed fairly rich (she went to a private school, anyway), but now they were both dead in one way or another. All in one swift, miserable, murdering day. At least I still had my dad, the great mechanic and car lover, making his life off in Iowa. Now, she had no one. Maybe, if we got out of this alive, I could-

"Hey, dreamer. We're there."


	4. Dylan's New Gun

I looked up to see us parked six inches over the curb outside of the Wal-Mart. It was one of those massive convenience stores designed to have everything, but all in the places you'd least expect to find it. I thought that this one had been newly renovated, maybe three or four months ago. Sorry, Wal-Mart executives: there's not much investment return on this one. Zombies don't buy potpourri.

In front of us, the automatic door slid gently open. I figured that Kara's heart-wrenching parking job must have triggered the motion sensor. Kara didn't seem to notice. Killing the engine, she slid out from behind the wheel and slammed the driver's-side door. She stood and surveyed the store as I followed suit, hopping out onto the pavement and crossing to her side.

"Doesn't look much like salvation, but there you go," she said.

"I hate shopping here," I said. "There's always a crowd and none of the lanes are ever open."

"Well, don't shop, then," she said. Then, winking, "Just look around."

She laughed at her own wit and strolled through the front doors. I followed at her heels; after all, she had the gun. Maybe we hadn't run into a zombie yet (even if we did get close…Kara drives like a maniac), but that didn't mean that there were none. In fact, what that meant to me was that the zombies were all gathered in one place, waiting for us to get there. If zombies can wait, exactly.

I was used to there being a greeter at the doors to Wal-Mart, and indeed I was not disappointed. However, instead of offering me the daily specials and pointing me toward the best sales, the white-haired lady bared bloody teeth at me and took off at a blistering limp to get herself a big bucket o' fried Dylan. Kara squinted one eye, lined the lady's frizzy hair up in the fine-tuned sights, and pulled the trigger. A shocking (and satisfying) roar took off the zomb's head, splattering fuzzy blue hair and bone fragments all over a magazine rack. The zombie stuttered out two more steps and took a dive, dropping her bottom jaw and not much else on the white-tile floor. Kara giggled a short laugh, set the shotgun on her shoulder, and walked onto the main route. Above, a grinning smiley-face proclaimed Wal-Mart's everyday low prices with a wink and a thumbs-up. I joined Kara in the aisle, thought very seriously about jacking a stereo (on sale for just 20.00 US this weekend only), and then decided that stereos might not be on Kara's list of necessary supplies.

"What do we need?" I asked instead.

"Well, let's try sporting first."

"Sporting? Seriously? We need a basketball or something?"

"_You_ need a gun. It just so happens that dad and I looked for rifles here before settling on an Umbrella-made one. They don't carry Umbrella here, too much power for the clientele here, but they have a couple good deer-hunting rifles."

"Wow. Sweet." I thought about having a rifle in my hands, taking off a zombie's head in much the same way that Kara did, and shivered. "Let's go."

Kara hurried down the center aisle, reading the overhead signs for the one that we needed. It wasn't long before she found 'Sporting Goods', sandwiched between 'Electronics' and 'Maternity'. True to her word, there was a glass rack of hunting rifles jutting out, right where the rednecks and jumpy adolescents couldn't miss it. I went up to the rack and scrutinized the rifles, seeking out the best bang for my bullet.

"Move."

I moved on command, mostly out of old habit and surprise. Kara took my spot, turned her eyes away from the rack, and smashed the glass with the butt of the shotgun. There was a tremendous shimmering splash of glass, scattered all over the floor and the inside of the rack. Kara looked cautiously up.

"You'll want the…hey."

She carefully reached up, lifting the rifle out of its setting by the stock. Looking it over from all sides, she frowned and flipped it again. Then she held it out to me. I took it, but I had to ask:

"What? What's wrong?"

"Wal-Mart is selling the Umbrella-manufactured NightScope deer and fowl rifle now. Before, it wouldn't have touched an Umbrella product with a ten-foot pole. I wonder what changed?"

"Maybe Umbrella put some corporate pressure on them…you know, like in the movies."

"Maybe. Either way, check that thing out. It's already got a scope on it, as you probably noticed. Flick that switch up there to change the scope to night vision. Yeah, that one. It's got a good kick to it, so hold her steady. You know the rest, I think, point and shoot, aim for the head. I think the zombies don't like it when they take one to the brain."

"Good observation. How do I reload it?"

"I'll show you tonight," she said. "For now, just don't shoot unless you have to. Let's get to the food section and- Dylan!"

I spun around, and almost pissed myself. Up until now, we'd seen two zombies up close, and maybe half a dozen more from the seat of Kara's truck. But coming out of the 'Electronics' section, crawling out of the video racks and CD aisles, were _dozens_ of the bastards. There were more weaving through the clothing, in and out of the dense forests of clearance shirts and sale boxers. There were even five or six marching down the way we'd just come, from the front of the store.

"Jesus," I whispered. "There's like a hundred."

Maybe there was. Blue-vested, civilian, or otherwise, each one of the zombies was hell-bent on getting a snack of our tasty flesh. Maybe they'd been drawn by the breaking glass; maybe they could _smell_ us, but either way, we were in deep shit. Then it got worse.

I saw the fucker out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't believe it. I couldn't bring myself to: I mean, zombies lurch (or at best, stumble), but this thing was crawling. Not just crawling, crawling _fast_. Not just crawling fast, crawling _on the ceiling._ So, can you blame me for not believing that I really saw it? Can you blame me for what happened?

They were on her like nothing I'd ever seen before. Two of them, long, lanky demons that might have been human once, one taking Kara from behind, the other launching itself off of a shelf and getting her from above. I fired out of panic, and through the grace of God I hit one of them and not Kara. It made a long squealing noise (surprisingly feminine, considering the source), and flipped backward, over Kara's head and into a rack of action figures. The other one, maybe seeing me as more of a threat than Kara (a chilling thought…can these fuckers _think?_), threw itself off of her and turned to face me. It was on all fours, and resembled nothing more than a man-sized lizard whose flesh had been flayed completely off. It turned its blind eyes to me and licked the air with a grotesque and completely inhuman tongue.

I fired again, but this one was ready. I heard the bullet ricochet off the floor and go into something soft. I only knew that it didn't hit Kara because the sound it made was more of a 'pop!' than a 'squish!' The vague part of my brain, unattached to all the action and violence around us, suggested that the bullet might have lodged in a pillow. The other part of my brain, the one now urging me to evacuate my bladder, screamed "_SHOOT IT NOW!" _ It was easier to listen to the screaming part, so I took aim and fired again.

The thing I was shooting at, zombie or ghoul or demon, jumped sideways, made a complete 180, and attached itself to a rack of video games. By then It had probably gotten tired of being shot at. It indicated this by charging at me.

I lost it then. I turned and ran, past 'Sports' and into 'Toys'. The snapping, slobbering, squealing thing tracked me, using racks and ceiling tiles and yes, even the floor as surfaces to cling to. I saw the end of the aisle up ahead, marked by board games: Scrabble, Othello, and Hi-Ho Cherry-O, from the looks of it. I lowered my head and gunned for those board games, hoping to anyone that I could use something there to stop the monster behind me. Instead, I ran smack into a zombie.


End file.
